cekerr - Slashdot User

Submission + - MIT takes aim at secure, self-healing cloud (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Monday February 27, 2012 @03:19PM

coondoggie writes: "Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have received funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to bring about a cloud infrastructure that could identify cyberattacks and heal itself from any damages."

Submission + - When Bill Gates urged Apple to license Mac technology (itworld.com)

Submitted by bdking on Monday February 27, 2012 @03:05PM

bdking writes: In June 1985, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, then just 30 years old, wrote a memo to the then-CEO of Apple, John Sculley, recommending that Apple start licensing Macintosh technology, something Microsoft would do later in the year with Windows 1.0. The memo to Sculley, reprinted in full on the website Letters of Note, is awash with references to technology days past, as Gates suggested Wang and Digital Equipment Corp. as potential Apple partners.

Submission + - Genetically Engineered Bacteria Could Help Fight Climate Change (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit on Monday February 27, 2012 @03:04PM

sciencehabit writes: As humans warm the planet by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, some researchers believe that capturing CO2 and trapping it in buried rocks could lower the risk of catastrophic climate change. Now a team of researchers has shown that bacteria can help the process along. They can even be genetically modified to trap CO2 faster, keeping it underground for millions of years.

Submission + - Rocket scientist to rock musician to rock video game creator-- Who's this guy? (patexia.com)

Submitted by

techgeek0279

on Monday February 27, 2012 @02:53PM

techgeek0279 writes: "He built rockets in his teens for the Navy with Robert Truax. He engineered the Spirit of America jet car with Craig Breedlove that inspired a Beach Boys song. He collaborated with New York Times bestselling author Peter Diamandis, X Prize Foundation founder. He even helped invent the music video game genre. Now, Dezso has created a street legal flying motorcycle that he is testing with world famous explorer Mike Horn and Brazilian astronaut Marcos Pontes."

Submission + - eBay: Ultra-Efficient Server Clusters in 115-Degree Heat (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by 1sockchuck on Monday February 27, 2012 @02:40PM

1sockchuck writes: eBay is running one of the world's most efficient high-density clusters in data center containers on a Phoenix rooftop. The containers house Hadoop clusters running at about 26 kilowatts per rack. Last August, when the outside temperature was 115 degrees, the eBay container recorded an efficiency rating that exceeded the best performances seen by Google, Yahoo or Facebook facilities. See the eBay blog and a case study by The Green Grid (PDF) for more details.

Submission + - Bad Breath Gas Speeds Up Stem Cell Transformation

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27, 2012 @02:39PM

An anonymous reader writes: An odorous gas, notorious for causing terrible breath and flatulence, and is also used in stink bombs has been used by Japanese scientists to speed up the process in transforming stem cells from human teeth into new liver cells.

Hydrogen sulphide, which smells like rotten eggs and cause, is a very poisonous and flammable gas in large quantities, and is produced in small amounts by bacteria living in the gut of mammals that break down organic matter.

Submission + - Ekso Sells First Robot Legs Allowing Paraplegics to Walk (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by

kkleiner

on Monday February 27, 2012 @02:17PM

kkleiner writes: "Mark down February 14th, 2012 as the day when exoskeletons became an established medical therapy. Ekso Bionics, formerly Berkeley Bionics and creators of the HULC army exoskeleton, have delivered their first commercial lower body system to Craig Hospital in Denver Colorado. The Ekso medical exoskeleton supports the body while moving the user’s legs for them. In other words, Ekso lets paraplegics walk again. Coming out of a ten month study performed across the country, the lower body exoskeleton has received FDA approval for safety, but more importantly it’s shown to be an effective means of getting paralyzed patients up and moving, possibly with large long term physical and psychological benefits."

Submission + - Why Did Google Buy Motorola, Then Firewall It? (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by

jfruh

on Monday February 27, 2012 @02:08PM

jfruh writes: "Google spent $12.5 billion dollars to buy Motorola Mobility — a lot of money, even for Google. But as the deal has slowly moved towards closing, Google has spent lots of energy insisting that their purchase of one of the most prominent manufacturers of Android phones and tablets won't result in any of the cooperation that you'd think would make the purchase worthwhile; Android head Andy Rubin says that there's a firewall between him and Motorola, and he has no idea what the company's plans are. So the persistent question arises: Why did Google bother?"

Submission + - Need to Find a Hackerspace in Africa? Look on This Map (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Monday February 27, 2012 @02:03PM

pigrabbitbear writes: "These days you can crowd-map about anything from Hurricane Irene to what you eat for breakfast as long as you either have a phone or a basic internet hook-up. One of the largest and most used platforms for crowd-sourced mapping is Ushahidi (Swahili for ‘witness’), an open-sourced platform has been used for tracking and mobilizing movement around more serious topics. Ushahidi was used in developing Syria Tracker, a crowd-sourcing of reported deaths in the conflict in Syria. Now the Ushahidi platform is putting technology hubs in Africa on the map. Literally.

The map, simply named Tech Hubs in Africa, was launched by Bongohive, a self described non-profit technology and innovation hub located in Lasaka, Zambia for one purpose: To have likeminded organizations across Africa—notorious for low levels of tech infrastructure—begin plotting the locations of tech hubs available around the continent right now."

Submission + - Intel announces new SoCs, aims for emerging markets (extremetech.com)

Submitted by

MrSeb

on Monday February 27, 2012 @01:33PM

MrSeb writes: "Even back when Intel first unveiled Medfield at CES, we knew the company was planning a number of additional announcements for Mobile World Congress this week. Things kicked off yesterday with UK provider Orange’s announcement that it’ll be rolling out Medfield phones this year. Today, Intel has announced that it has partnered with Lava to bring a Medfield phone to India, and it has taken the wraps off some new SoCs and modems. In the second half of 2012, the low-power single-threaded 1GHz Atom Z2000 will launch, and then in early 2013 the 32nm dual-core (and Hyper-Threaded) 1.8GHz Z2580 will emerge. Alongside the Z2580, Intel will also launch a 28nm LTE radio, the XMM 7160. Of the two new Atoms, the high-end dual-core part is more likely to capture headlines, but it’s the lower-end Z2000 that’s driving Intel’s grand vision. India and China are two of the fastest-growing cell phone markets on the planet. In these markets, the Z2000 will be going up against single-core phones based on the ARM11 architecture that pre-dates even the Cortex-A8. The Z2000s capabilities will make it an extremely potent competitor for the likes of the HTC Explorer or Lenovo A60; both devices currently sell into the sub-$200 smartphone segment."

Submission + - Telefónica working with Mozilla to build open Web-centric smartphone (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27, 2012 @01:10PM

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla announced today that it has partnered with mobile network operator Telefónica to deliver a complete mobile operating system built around standards-based Web technologies. They plan to bring the platform to market later this year on a prototype device that they are developing in collaboration with Qualcomm.

Submission + - Samsung Announces Galaxy Note 10.1

Submitted by adeelarshad82 on Monday February 27, 2012 @12:57PM

adeelarshad82 writes: Earlier today Samsung today announced the Galaxy Note 10.1, an Android tablet built specifically to draw or write on. The 10 inch tablet comes with a stylus similar to what we've seen in Galaxy Note 5-inch. The tablet runs Android 4.0 on a 1280-by-800 screen. It's powered by 1.4GHz, dual-core processor and carries a 3-megapixel camera on the back and a 2-megapixel camera on the front. Unfortunately thought, according to a hands on, Galaxy Note 10.1 not only lacks design but also apps.

Submission + - European Court Finds Use of Gas Not a Violation of Human Rights (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by __aaqpaq9254 on Monday February 27, 2012 @12:40PM

__aaqpaq9254 writes: This is pretty startling. Alexander Kelle has a disturbing article about the European Court decision that the use of gas in the hostage situation at a Moscow theater did not violate human rights: "On December 20, 2011, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, ruled that the "use of gas against terrorists during the Moscow theatre siege was justified." It did not, that is, violate the right to life — enshrined in Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights — of the 700-plus hostages in a Moscow theater almost a decade ago."

Submission + - Vatican Attack Provides Insight into Anonymous

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Monday February 27, 2012 @12:38PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "John Markoff writes that an unsuccessful campaign against the Vatican by Anonymous, which did not receive wide attention at the time, provides a rare glimpse into the recruiting, reconnaissance, and warfare tactics used by the shadowy hacking collective and may be the first end-to-end record of a full Anonymous attack. The attack, called Operation Pharisee in a reference to the sect that Jesus called hypocrites, was initially organized by hackers in South America and Mexico and was designed to disrupt Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Madrid in August 2011 for World Youth Day and draw attention to child sexual abuse by priests. First the hackers spent weeks spreading their message through their own website and social sites like Twitter and Flickr calling on volunteers to download free attack software and imploring them to “stop child abuse” by joining the cause. It took the hackers 18 days to recruit enough people, then a core group of roughly a dozen skilled hackers spent three days poking around the church’s World Youth Day site looking for common security holes that could let them inside. In this case, the scanning software failed to turn up any gaps so the hackers turned to a brute-force approach of a distributed denial-of-service, On the first day, the denial-of-service attack resulted in 28 times the normal traffic to the church site, rising to 34 times the next day but did not crash the site. “Anonymous is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots,” says Cole Stryker, an author who has researched the movement. “You have four or five guys who really know what they’re doing and are able to pull off some of the more serious hacks, and then thousands of people spreading the word, or turning their computers over to participate in a DDoS attack.”"

Submission + - The Demise of Kodak: Five Reasons (wsj.com)

Submitted by

pbahra

on Monday February 27, 2012 @12:23PM

pbahra writes: "Kodak’s declaration of bankruptcy earlier this month closed a glorious chapter in the history of photography. With the introduction of the first automatic snapshot camera more than 110 years ago, Kodak transformed photography from an alchemy-like activity dominated by professionals into a hugely popular one that became an integral part of people’s lives. Photography had been mostly confined to professionals who took formal portraits in studios. Kodak got photography out of studios and into family life. Understanding how it did this is vital to grasping the reasons for its failure. Thus, when digital technology arrived in the photographic industry, Kodak inhabited a world that was largely its own creation. There was no one more steeped in it than Kodak. This became obvious to me when I spent a day with Kodak’s top management in their Rochester headquarters in the U.S. about 11 years ago. But by the end of the day, I was convinced that this company was not going to be around much longer. Here are the top five reasons for Kodak’s demise:"

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